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Flowers wreathed the gates of the Gdansk shipyard, where the trade union movement that helped overthrow communism in Poland was born 25 years ago. In Solidarity Square, named after that movement, patriotism bloomed, too, as crowds chanted "Polska! Polska!" at a ceremony last month celebrating Solidarity's founding. For Lech Kaczynski, 56, mayor of Warsaw and leader of the Law and Justice Party, it was an emotional moment. Lech and his twin brother, Jaroslaw, helped establish Solidarity, and returned to Gdansk for the commemorations. "I was thinking of all those years of underground struggle," Lech told Time last week, sipping a coke in a dimly lit office in central Warsaw. "I was thinking of my brother being released from prison and of the struggle that lay ahead."

The struggle that lies ahead of Lech Kaczynski now is an attempt to win parliamentary and presidential elections over the next three weeks. On Sunday, Poles choose a new parliament; then, on Oct. 9, Kaczynski and 12 other candidates face voters in the presidential poll. The elections are unique because the frontrunners for president — Kaczynski and Donald Tusk, head of the Civic Platform — are both prominent Solidarity figures, and because for the first time since 1989 economics is as important as ideology in determining the outcome. "There's always been a disconnect between politics and the economy," says Witold Orlowski, an adviser to outgoing President Aleksander Kwasniewski. No party ever gets the blame, for example, for Poland's groaning state finances. But now, Orlowski argues, persuading voters to accept the need for painful structural reforms and a slimmer welfare state "will be the main political task of the new government." Are the two Solidarity veterans up to it?

They'd better be. Since joining the E.U. last year, Poland's been on something of a roll. The country has enjoyed impressive growth (an expected 4% this year), booming exports of food and some manufactured goods to the rest of the Union, and a higher profile on the world stage. This has instilled a new confidence in the burgeoning entrepreneurial class, emboldening its members to demand solutions to problems like the 17.9% unemployment rate, stifling bureaucracy and spiraling government spending. "I'd like to slam all those politicians in the head and shake them!" shouts Andrzej Kuzmicki, 40, owner of an underwear company in the northeastern city of Bialystok. "We need real change."

Tusk and his Civic Platform say they're offering just that. He's been campaigning hard on promises to bring in a 15% flat tax on corporate and personal income, ease the rules for hiring and firing, and radically streamline government bureaucracy — though he's stopped short of suggesting specific spending cuts. Policies like these would suit Kuzmicki just fine. He saw his exports of lingerie rise 700% last year, but says "economic policy still favors the interests of the working class and trade unions." Wieslaw Grzyb, 44, the owner of a bicycle manufacturer that employs 750 people in Poland and Ukraine, agrees that Civic Platform "has a better program" for business. He wants government off his back: "I don't expect the government to help me with my business. I count on myself."

Kaczynski is counting on voters still wanting a bigger role for government. Once Lech Walesa's designated successor to lead Solidarity, Kaczynski left politics in the early 1990s and later taught law at Warsaw University. He returned in 2000 as Justice Minister, and he and his brother founded Law and Justice the next year. His party promises a "strong" state and higher social benefits for union members. Kaczynski calls Tusk's flat tax "extremely dangerous," and socially unjust because it would mainly benefit the rich.

Like Kaczynski, Tusk was an early Solidarity activist. He was forced out of his job in a publishing house after the authorities imposed martial law. For years, he made ends meet by fixing cranes and cleaning industrial chimneys. He formally entered politics in 1991, joining a variety of short-lived post-Solidarity parties before co-founding Civic Platform. Once a staunch anticommunist, he has recently cultivated an image as a "moderate, liberal" politician with solid family values. Unlike Kaczynski, he eschews heated anticommunist rhetoric, promising instead to restore "dignity, honor and unselfishness" to Polish political life.

And he has thrown himself into the campaign with a vengeance, stumping through the August holidays and dotting the countryside with huge billboards extolling president tusk: a man with principles. The strategy has paid off. Tusk was polling at just 19% in early August; now he's at 51%, some 22 percentage points ahead of Kaczynski.

In parliamentary elections, meanwhile, the Civic Platform last week was running at 36% to the Law and Justice Party's 23%. If those numbers hold up — and if Tusk goes on to win the presidential poll — the Civic Platform will likely end up controlling both the presidency and the parliament as senior partner in a coalition with the Kaczynskis' party. That alliance could be fraught with tensions. Fractious coalitions are hardly unusual in Polish politics, but Civic Platform leaders may find the Law and Justice Party an especially restless bedfellow. In addition to the rift over the flat tax, Kaczynski says he'll push for a more "social" economic policy, and limit privatization in sectors deemed vital to the "security of the state."

There could be personal, as well as policy, differences, too. There was some early friction last week when Kaczynski said that if the Civic Platform took all the top government posts, there would be no coalition. "A compromise is possible," snapped Bronislaw Komorowski, a senior Civic Platform leader, "but not on the basis of blackmail that someone has a right to this or that post."

It was opposition to communism that brought together a disparate group of socialists, free marketeers, intellectuals, dockworkers, lawyers and university professors to found Solidarity a quarter of a century ago. Now members of that group have a chance to transform Poland once again. "It's a pity they haven't created one party," says Ewa Januchowksa, 30, who runs a strawberry farm in Wagrowiec in western Poland with her husband; she's certain the time is right for members of the movement to take charge. To do so effectively, though, they'll have to work together, and show a little more solidarity.

• ANDREW PURVIS / Warsaw
• Ahead of national elections in Poland, two post-Solidarity parties are fighting it out. But it's economics, not ideology, that will dictate who succeeds